This year I organized the Software Freedom Day in Kiel with a handful of other folks. This means I did 90% of the preparations and got a hand for the last two days of five others. I was thinking that we all plan and do things together but I found out that this was not what people wanted, really. Everybody likes to talk, but only few people like to take responsibility. But many people like to help, if they can. So I think the bad decision at the beginning was to think that others would take responsibility from early on. But some expected either a better planning or just wanted to give a hand. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that – only that on our first meeting where I asked about expectations and montivations nobody was coming out what he or she was up to – and so we just moved forward.

The result was that I did not work on some stuff like making sure we got the room 100% in the early stage and also I was not the one who planned the printing of flyers and posters. Besides some ideas nobody else could bring in talkers with topics who would assure us they will come. So this resulted in uncertainty of room, speakers and promotion. As you can easily see these are the basics of every event like that. I take responsibility for letting this happen. Sure one could say everybody could have thinked about those things – but I was the one who asked people to join doing this in Kiel, answering a question of somebody from Rendsburg. As an anarchist I do not like to lead or mak decisions for other people – but I tend to think that you ahve to come up with some kind of blueprint of an event. If you have three people that are also friends or fellow students of informatics maybe it might be possible to develop the basic ideas together. But if some people live outside and others have only few time for preparation the problem you end up is that you think you cant make decisions and delay them if the people are not present – but then time moves forward and you have to get more things done in less time. This is ok to some extend – but it can become critical.

Event planning needs a safety margin so if unforeseeable things happen you still can accomplish your goal to make the event happen. In our case we were able to make a successful event, but without much promotion – like we did not een had the chance for the school to maybe advertise the event on their homepage, parental letter , etc. – the only promotion went in announcing in the XING social network – in an address list from 2007 Kieler Linuxtage – upcoming.org and direct invitations letters to 22 schools and word of mouth. And we then had 20 attendees. All talks went well, the people who cam got a lot of information and answers to their questions and so in a small sense it was successful. OTOH we could have done much more.

So what would or will I do better next year. Firstly I already found that the location is critical. Its the first thing besides the date that needs to be fixed. Next year I would like to find a school who would like to participate actively in the event. And in that sense that they advertise the event as their own event, also. I think a school is a very good place, because here young people learn about computers and the infrastructure is already present. It would be nice if the SFD would fit into some activities that either already exist or start with or after the SFD. It then would be nice to have early contact with representatives of the school especially the teachers who would be interested in doing this.

When it comes to promotion I like to have a better oversight in the options and the costs, before the planning phase. I also think having at least one sponsor would be beneficial to cover the basic expenses – like if we print posters one can put the sponsor on it and so he also gets an advertisement by sponsoring the costs.

About speakers. I think its nice to have speakers from the own hometown. but I also like to have some expert for questions of schools next time. Also I would like to have a room with computers where we can load live cds and maybe also work on them. BTW: Th installable Live-CD is a bit dangerous for schools – as this allows a user to overwrite the installed system.